Morn the Loss of Album Artwork?

Years ago I read a magazine article about a man lamenting about the loss of LP album artwork. He was morning the fact that as CD's became more and more popular all the album artwork was shrinking. Gone were the big bold album covers of yesteryear. At the time I thought really nothing of it. To me the CD's still had the album artwork, you could still see it. So it really didn't bother me, he just sounded like an old man morning the loss of the past.

While editing the tags on some MP3's of songs I just ripped from my CDs it occurred to me, with the future of music (and movies and books for that matter) moving more and more towards the digital download distribution, what becomes of the album artwork?

The reason this popped up in my head is often when I download a song from a band's site and more recently off eMusic (I finally joined a paid service) or when I rip a CD, I often have to add the album artwork to the MP3's tag. The MP3's are just files, 1's and 0's on a hard drive. LP's, cassettes, and CD's all have always had artwork, but through the digital distribution process, artwork seems to, so far, have been lost.

Is this the future? Music and artwork always seemed to go hand in hand for me. Part of the reason I finally broke down and got an 5th gen iPod was it it would display the album artwork while the song played. When I listened to CD's I would often look at the cover or go through the booklet. When I was a kid listening to LP's or cassettes I would do the same. So far most of the music I've downloaded through online services (MusicMatch, eMusic, band web sites, MySpace, etc.) have rarely had any artwork. iTunes has artwork for now, mainly because the songs they are selling also come out on CD, so they can package it with the file. In the future will they too not have album artwork if there is no longer a physical means of music distribution?

I hope not. I mean, like I said music and art go hand in hand to me. I can listen to a song and picture it's artwork in my head. Or vise-versa I can see an album cover and have the songs pop into my head. To further the music going hand and hand, who can hear Yes and not picture Roger Dean's artwork? Iron Maiden and not picture Derrick Riggs' artwork. KMFDM and not picture Brute's artwork. These bands rose to fame and so did the artists that did their artwork. They became semi-entangled as one would make you think of the other, mutually benefiting each other and working off of each other.

So I do hope that album artwork does not go the way of the Dodo. It would be a sad world with out it, to me at least. Or maybe I'm just an old man, morning the loss of the past.